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The manifesto of a generation lost in the disappointment of modernity, the diary of a former bohemian who found himself living with heartaches and the struggles of an era definitively sunsetted: This Side of Paradise, one of the main works in the novelistic canon of Fitzgerald, describes, though not too sharply separated, two worlds, two epochs, two regimes, two constellations of vices and virtues unable to live hand in hand or—at the very least—in the most peaceful and relaxed civil and social coexistence. The Paradise of idyllic aristocratic serenity, ascetic, sentimental, perpetually satiated with banquets of romanticism and poetry, collapses ruinously towards a bleak Purgatory of shattered dreams, broken memories and, above all, a fresh youth in the phase of exhaustion and metamorphosis into the cold adult era of harsh concreteness and rough prosaicness. Early twentieth century, post-World War I disenchantment, the dionysian-apollonian revelry and balance give way to the vile reality of transition and of Man realizing almost out of nowhere to be mortal flesh, perishable like the beings surrounding him: a transition immediately comparable to the carefree youth forced to abandon his age’s virtuosity and walk on the bitter sidewalks of risk and threat, constantly careful not to stumble on the chasms of ruin and decay.
Amory Blaine, the protagonist of the work, is a sort of "heir" ante litteram, son of the charming Beatrice and scion of a rich and well-fed family, the perfect social template of that Belle Époque in which unreality and magic, well-being and fun blended. A sort of Yankee version of Oscar Wilde, a lover of poetry and sensory perceptions in verses, an apprentice aesthete of universal virtues and artist of hyper-human refinement, Amory decides, after a period of separation from the "world of others," to first access higher education and thus University, more precisely, in the less rigid Princeton. Within the complex academic machinery, the young dandy can only find what he is looking for, and, freed from the rigid classicism of teaching, he exploits the traditional university social networks to make himself known as an excellent gentle-young and establish contacts with his peers. Filled with ups and downs, reluctance to study, and full immersion in the art of literature, the years spent at Princeton represent for Amory the first of many fractures between a dream-filled youth and adult context, a split that will tend to widen with the end of his family’s wealth and properties, the loves unfulfilled due to ancient social conventions, alcoholism, legal problems, and the chronic lack of a job and a stable social position. At the end of the novel, the protagonist, disheartened by the fatality of human existence, alienated and estranged from lost youth, will try to cross the dark fortress of maturity by building for himself and for no one else a sort of economic and spiritual universe based on the socialist hypothesis, the last attempt not to lose that Paradise that had given him birth and had nurtured him with exquisite fruits for the soul and body.
The key character delineated by Fitzgerald, Amory Blaine, unfolds a broad spectrum of reflections and digressions useful to crown the ultimate sense of the work. Amory is a sort of "last romantic," guilty of being born in an era of material and spiritual revelries at the edge of their continuation possibilities. To this terminal glimmer of genuine romanticism, manifested in the choice of building a life based on literary and poetic suggestions, adds a dandy and bohemian attitude: Amory’s construction thus comes to fuse in a single individual the romantic and idealistic asceticism and the vigor of the young aesthete who does not shy away from the pleasures of life and corporeity. Unfortunately for our boy, romanticism and aestheticism—apparently at the antipodes, yet in reality two sides of the same coin aiming to portray the flight from earthly sadness—are destined to be defeated in front of the not-so-revolutionary impetus of materialism and death, entities concretized first with the war and then with prohibitionism, depression, and poverty. For Amory, the passage from happy abstraction to desolate tangibility is doubly caustic and destructive: the sudden extinction of social, spiritual, and economic fertility is relentlessly replaced by the frontier between youth and adulthood, a frontier perpetually lashed by the wind of disillusionment and the storm of inadequacy.
Like the illustrious colleagues of the "Lost Generation," Fitzgerald has excellently illustrated the complexity of a vital passage not so easy to internalize, managing, moreover, to juxtapose it—almost to the point of making it coincide—with the drama of the Belle Époque betrayed by its own proponents. Subjectivity and objectivity, individual and society, personal history and the history of peoples, spirit and matter marry in a triumph of contrasts, fractures, and accidents entirely normal for the cycle of history yet unable to repeat quietly, without producing any effect in a living being capable of thinking and walking simultaneously.
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